On May 10, 2008, at 4:08 PM, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 03:05:03PM +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
>> 2. Because (I believe) it's faster than a lookup table
>> It's faster *for a person*.
I cannot express how emphatically i agree with this point, even though
what i primarily do is not databases. Nobody likes looking at numbers
in trace output or data dumps when they could be seeing the names to
which those numbers refer, instead. Even if you can do the
translation in your head, it saps mental bandwidth, and prevents you
seeing important patterns you might otherwise have discovered by
accident.
Do you read like to your ascii text files as hexadecimal numeric
values? Didn't think so. :-)
--
elysse: You dance better than some.
me: "Some" what?
elysse: Some asparagus.